Weld County District Attorney Ken Buck speaks to supporters during a campaign dinner event at Johnson’s Corner, a truck stop and diner in Johnstown, in January. (Brennan Linsley, Associated Press file)

It’s been said that if you repeat a lie often enough, eventually it becomes accepted as the truth. The lie often repeated by Democrats is that Republicans are waging a “war on women.”

That narrative focuses exclusively on reproductive rights, ignoring other issues of importance to women. Candidates are labeled “anti-women” if they don’t support completely unrestricted abortion on demand and/or if they don’t agree with forcing people to pay for someone else’s contraception.

To borrow a favorite word of Vice President Joe Biden, the “war on women” is pure malarkey, a side show designed to fool low-information voters. Yet the tactic was used with striking effectiveness in 2010 to destroy the U.S. Senate campaign of Weld Country District Attorney Ken Buck and again in 2012 to defeat Mitt Romney.

It continues being used today to smear pro-life Republicans in campaigns nationwide. In 2010, Buck lost a senate race he should have won easily. It was a huge year for Republicans nationally, where they won the U.S. House by enormous margins and picked up six U.S. Senate seats.

Colorado was a different story. Buck lost to Michael Bennet by just two points. The deciding factor was his low support among women, which collapsed thanks to a coordinated effort by well-financed outside groups to paint him as an anti-women candidate.

Four years later, Buck is a wiser man who refuses to be tagged again with that absurd label. To the delight of Republicans, he’s announced plans to run for the 4th District U.S. House seat being vacated by Cory Gardner. Instead of seeking re-election, Gardner will challenge Mark Udall for the U.S. Senate in November.

While his chances to win Gardner’s seat are excellent, Buck knows the “war on women” myth will rear its ugly head again in the 2014 race. This time, he’s launching a pre-emptive strike to counter it. The Buck campaign recently released a 2-minute web video to show that the real Ken Buck is a champion of women, not the inaccurate caricature portrayed in Democrat attack ads.

Called “Stephanie’s Story,” the video features Stephanie Drobny, who fled Montana with her two children to escape an abusive husband who threatened to kill her. When she came to Colorado, Buck used his position as district attorney to help her. He took Drobny’s case to the state legislature, where he successfully pushed for the closure of a loophole in the law that permitted her dangerous husband to contact their children.

Buck told The Daily Caller’s Matt K. Lewis that he has helped numerous other victims of rape and abuse during his 25 years as a prosecutor and promised to release several more videos similar to the Drobny one to set the record straight.

Republicans would do well to follow Buck’s lead. Part of their problem lately is they’ve allowed their opponents to define them. Thankfully, not every woman is a liberal, pro-abortion, welfare-state-worshipping acolyte of Sandra Fluke or Elizabeth Warren, despite the rather patronizing insinuations by Democrats that the only issues women care about are abortion and birth control.

A large segment of women consider themselves to be anti-abortion. Many are actually concerned with plenty of other important issues that the Democrats have ignored or bungled, issues like personal safety, access to affordable health care and expanded job opportunities.

While Democrats obsess over abortion and contraceptives, women are struggling to find good jobs and paying more for lesser health care. Women’s safety is also threatened by Democrats who think a woman deserves nothing more than a whistle and a call box to protect herself. A prime example is Amanda Collins, a rape victim whose pleas to uphold the rights of women to arm themselves for personal protection on college campuses were met with condescending dismissal by Democrats in the Colorado legislature last year.

To the extent there is any “war on women” at all, it is the one being waged by Democrats who encourage perpetual dependence on government and support policies that strip women of their means to self-defense.

Reid Lusk is a lifelong Colorado resident who works in the financial services field. He is a member of the 2014 Colorado Voices panel.